Nature: Some bird names obvious, but others are mystifying

WONDERS OF NATURE

Published 5:30 am, Saturday, April 30, 2005

While bird-watchers called out the names of birds as they spotted them last weekend at High Island, I couldn't help but wonder: How did these birds get such jazzy names?

Actually, most English names for birds come about as a way to describe them. There is indeed a warbler with a blue cast to its wings, a tanager that's scarlet and a vireo with reddish eyes.

Makes it easy to know a bird by its name.

Everyone knows a mockingbird mocks the songs of other birds — not to mention cell phones and doorbells. We know a woodpecker pecks on wood, a bluebird is blue and a chickadee rings out its name with a chick-a-dee-dee song.

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But does a titmouse look like a tiny mouse? No, the name comes from an Anglo-Saxon word, mase, meaning small bird.

Does a red-bellied woodpecker have a red belly? No, its belly is blushed with pink, but the top of its head is red.

OK, some names are confusing. Warblers don't typically warble. A few muster the semblance of a melodic song, but most make a series of buzzy notes. They got their warbler moniker from early European settlers who thought the brightly colored birds looked like the sweet-throated warblers of Europe.

Then there are birds like the Louisiana and Northern waterthrushes that aren't thrushes at all but warblers. Some bird names endure, accurate or not.

But most bird names accurately describe key characteristics. For example, take the Texas shorebird known as the ruddy turnstone. It's ruddy and really does turn over stones in search of insects, marine worms and crustaceans. Black skimmers are black and really do skim the sea surface with their beaks. And laughing gulls really do cackle.

Several birds are named after people. The 19th-century naturalist John James Audubon was fond of naming birds after his friends, like the Bewick's wren that he first found in Louisiana and named for British engraver Thomas Bewick. He named the Swainson's warbler after fellow ornithologist William Swainson.

Birds named after states include the Carolina wren that Audubon named for the Carolinas because that's where he noticed the little wrens congregating in large flocks.

August Wilson, another 19th-century naturalist, christened the Tennessee warbler because he first found it on the banks of the Cumberland River in Tennessee.

We all could go around giving names to birds if there were any new birds to name.

Or we could rename birds with our own folk names like my grandparents did, but the names would not likely show up in the vocabulary of bird-watchers.